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"She's one of my adopted children." He gazed between his knees at the
sidewalk.
"Have you many others?"
"Three."
"Raising them, are you?"
"Yes."
"They seem to think, down in Noank, that living as you do and giving
everything away is satisfactory to you but rather hard on your wife and
children."
"Well, it is true that she did feel a little uncertain in the beginning,
but she's never wanted for anything. She'll tell you herself that she's
never been without a thing that she really needed, and she's been
happy."
He paused to meditate, I presume, over the opinion of his former fellow
townsmen, and then added:
"It's true, there have been times when we have been right where we had
to have certain things pretty badly, before they came, but they never
failed to come."
While he was still talking, Mrs. Potter came around the corner of the
house and out upon the sidewalk. She was going to the Saturday evening
market in the city below.
"Here she is," he said. "Now you can ask her."
"What is it?" she inquired, turning a serene and smiling face to me.
"They still think, down in Noank, that you're not very happy with me,"
he said. "They're afraid you want for something once in a while."
She took this piece of neighborly interference in better fashion than
most would, I fancy.
"I have never wanted for anything since I have been married to my
husband," she said. "I am thoroughly contented."
She looked at him and he at her, and there passed between them an
affectionate glance.
"Yes," he said, when she had passed after a pleasing little
conversation, "my wife has been a great help to me. She has never
complained."
"People are inclined to talk a little," I said.
"Well, you see, she never complained, but she did feel a little bit
worried in the beginning."
"Have you a mission or a church here in Norwich?"
"No, I don't believe in churches."
"Not in churches?"
"No. The sight of a minister preaching the word of God for so much a
year is all a mockery to me."
"What do you believe in?"
"Personal service. Churches and charitable institutions and societies
are all valueless. You can't reach your fellowman that way. They build
up buildings and pay salaries--but there's a better way." (I was
thinking of St. Francis and his original dream, before they threw him
out and established monasteries and a costume or uniform--the thing he
so much objected to.) "This giving of a few old clothes that the moths
will get anyhow, that won't do. You've got to give something of
yourself, and that's affection. Love is the only thing you can really
give in all this world. When you give love, you give everything.
Everything comes with it in some way or other."
"How do you say?" I queried. "Money certainly comes handy sometimes."
"Yes, when you give it with your own hand and heart--in no other way. It
comes to nothing just contributed to some thing. Ah!" he added, with
sudden animation, "the tangles men can get themselves into, the snarls,
the wretchedness! Troubles with women, with men whom they owe, with evil
things they say and think, until they can't walk down the street any
more without peeping about to see if they are followed. They can't look
you in die face; can't walk a straight course, but have got to sneak
around corners. Poor, miserable, unhappy--they're worrying and crying
and dodging one another!"
He paused, lost in contemplation of the picture he had conjured up.
"Yes," I went on catechistically, determined, if I could, to rout out
this matter of giving, this actual example of the modus operandi of
Christian charity. "What do you do? How do you get along without giving
them money?"
"I don't get along without giving them some money. There are cases, lots
of them, where a little money is necessary. But, brother, it is so
little necessary at times. It isn't always money they want. You can't
reach them with old clothes and charity societies," he insisted. "You've
got to love them, brother. You've got to go to them and love them, just
as they are, scarred and miserable and bad-hearted."
"Yes," I replied doubtfully, deciding to follow this up later. "But just
what is it you do in a needy case? One instance?"
"Why, one night I was passing a little house in this town," he went on,
"and I heard a woman crying. I went right to the door and opened it, and
when I got inside she just stopped and looked at me.
"'Madam,' I said, 'I have come to help you, if I can. Now you tell me
what you're crying for.'
"Well, sir, you know she sat there and told me how her husband drank and
how she didn't have anything in the house to eat, and so I just gave her
all I had and told her I would see her husband for her, and the next day
I went and hunted him up and said to him, 'Oh, brother, I wish you would
open your eyes and see what you are doing. I wish you wouldn't do that
any more. It's only misery you are creating.' And, you know, I got to
telling about how badly his wife felt about it, and how I intended to
work and try and help her, and bless me if he didn't up and promise me
before I got through that he wouldn't do that any more. And he didn't.
He's working today, and it's been two years since I went to him,
nearly."
His eyes were alight with his appreciation of personal service.
"Yes, that's one instance," I said.
"Oh, there are plenty of them," he replied. "It's the only way. Down
here in New London a couple of winters ago we had a terrible time of it.
That was the winter of the panic, you know. Cold--my, but that was a
cold winter, and thousands of people out of work--just thousands. It was
awful. I tried to do what I could here and there all along, but finally
things got so bad there that I went to the mayor. I saw they were
raising some kind of a fund to help the poor, so I told him that if he'd
give me a little of the money they were talking of spending that I'd
feed the hungry for a cent-and-a-half a meal."
"A cent-and-a-half a meal!"
"Yes, sir. They all thought it was rather curious, not possible at
first, but they gave me the money and I fed 'em."
"Good meals?"
"Yes, as good as I ever eat myself," he replied.
"How did you do it?" I asked.
"Oh, I can cook. I just went around to the markets, and told the
market-men what I wanted--heads of mackerel, and the part of the halibut
that's left after the rich man cuts off his steak--it's the poorest part
that he pays for, you know. And I went fishing myself two or three
times--borrowed a big boat and got men to help me--oh, I'm a good
fisherman, you know. And then I got the loan of an old covered brickyard
that no one was using any more, a great big thing that I could close up
and build fires in, and I put my kettle in there and rigged up tables
out of borrowed boards, and got people to loan me plates and spoons and
knives and forks and cups. I made fish chowder, and fish dinners, and
really I set a very fine table, I did, that winter."
"For a cent-and-a-half a meal!"
"Yes, sir, a cent-and-a-half a meal. Ask any one in New London. That's
all it cost me. The mayor said he was surprised at the way I did it."
"Well, but there wasn't any particular personal service in the money
they gave you?" I asked, catching him up on that point. "They didn't
personally serve--those who gave you the money?"
"No, sir, they didn't," he replied dreamily, with unconscious
simplicity. "But they gave through me, you see. That's the way it was. I
gave the personal service. Don't you see? That's the way."
"Yes, that's the way," I smiled, avoiding as far as possible a further
discussion of this contradiction, so unconscious on his part, and in the
drag of his thought he took up another idea.
"I clothed 'em that winter, too--went around and got barrels and boxes
of old clothing. Some of them felt a little ashamed to put on the
things, but I got over that, all right. I was wearing them myself, and I
just told them, 'Don't feel badly, brother. I'm wearing them out of the
same barrel with you--I'm wearing them out of the same barrel.' Got my
clothes entirely free for that winter."
"Can you always get all the aid you need for such enterprises?"
"Usually, and then I can earn a good deal of money when I work steadily.
I can get a hundred and fifty dollars for a little yacht, you know,
every time I find time to make one; and I can make a good deal of money
out of fishing. I went out fishing here on the Fourth of July and caught
two hundred blackfish--four and five pounds, almost, every one of them."
"That ought to be profitable," I said.
"Well, it was," he replied.
"How much did you get for them?"
"Oh, I didn't sell them," he said. "I never take money for my work that
way. I gave them all away."
"What did you do?" I asked, laughing--"advertise for people to come for
them?"
"No. My wife took some, and my daughters, and I took the rest and we
carried them around to people that we thought would like to have them."
"Well, that wasn't so profitable, was it?" I commented amusedly.
"Yes, they were fine fish," he replied, not seeming to have heard me.
We dropped the subject of personal service at this point, and I
expressed the opinion that his service was only a temporary expedient.
Times changed, and with them, people. They forgot. Perhaps those he
aided were none the better for accepting his charity.
"I know what you mean," he said. "But that don't make any difference.
You just have to keep on giving, that's all, see? Not all of 'em turn
back. It helps a lot. Money is the only dangerous thing to give--but I
never give money--not very often. I give myself, rather, as much as
possible. I give food and clothing, too, but I try to show 'em a new
way--that's not money, you know. So many people need a new way. They're
looking for it often, only they don't seem to know how. But God, dear
brother, however poor or mean they are--He knows. You've got to reach
the heart, you know, and I let Him help me. You've got to make a man
over in his soul, if you want to help him, and money won't help you to
do that, you know. No, it won't."
He looked up at me in clear-eyed faith. It was remarkable.
"Make them over?" I queried, still curious, for it was all like a
romance, and rather fantastic to me. "What do you mean? How do you make
them over?"
"Oh, in their attitude, that's how. You've got to change a man and bring
him out of self-seeking if you really want to make him good. Most men
are so tangled up in their own errors and bad ways, and so worried over
their seekings, that unless you can set them to giving it's no use.
They're always seeking, and they don't know what they want half the
time. Money isn't the thing. Why, half of them wouldn't understand how
to use it if they had it. Their minds are not bright enough. Their
perceptions are not clear enough. All you can do is to make them content
with themselves. And that, giving to others will do. I never saw the man
or the woman yet who couldn't be happy if you could make them feel the
need of living for others, of doing something for somebody besides
themselves. It's a fact. Selfish people are never happy."
He rubbed his hands as if he saw the solution of the world's
difficulties very clearly, and I said to him:
"Well, now, you've got a man out of the mire, and 'saved,' as you call
it, and then what? What comes next?"
"Well, then he's saved," he replied. "Happiness comes next--content."
"I know. But must he go to church, or conform to certain rules?"
"No, no, no!" he replied sweetly. "Nothing to do except to be good to
others. 'True religion and undefiled before our God and Father is
this,'" he quoted, "'to visit the widow and the orphan in their
affliction and to keep unspotted from the world. Charity is kind,' you
know. 'Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, seeketh not its
own.'"
"Well," I said, rather aimlessly, I will admit, for this high faith
staggered me. (How high! How high!) "And then what?"
"Well, then the world would come about. It would be so much better. All
the misery is in the lack of sympathy one with another. When we get that
straightened out we can work in peace. There are lots of things to do,
you know."
Yes, I thought, looking down on the mills and the driving force of
self-interest--on greed, lust, love of pleasure, all their fantastic and
yet moving dreams.
"I'm an ignorant man myself, and I don't know all," he went on, "and I'd
like to study. My, but I'd like to look into all things, but I can't do
it now. We can't stop until this thing is straightened out. Some time,
maybe," and he looked peacefully away.
"By the way," I said, "whatever became of the man to whom you gave your
rubber boots over on Fisher's Island?"
His face lit up as if it were the most natural thing that I should know
about it.
"Say," he exclaimed, in the most pleased and confidential way, as if we
were talking about a mutual friend, "I saw him not long ago. And, do you
know, he's a good man now--really, he is. Sober and hard-working. And,
say, would you believe it, he told me that I was the cause of it--just
that miserable old pair of rubber boots--what do you think of that?"
I shook his hand at parting, and as we stood looking at each other in
the shadow of the evening I asked him:
"Are you afraid to die?"
"Say, brother, but I'm not," he returned. "It hasn't any terror for me
at all. I'm just as willing. My, but I'm willing."
He smiled and gripped me heartily again, and, as I was starting to go,
said:
"If I die tonight, it'll be all right. He'll use me just as long as He
needs me. That I know. Good-by."
"Good-by," I called back.
He hung by his fence, looking down upon the city. As I turned the next
corner I saw him awakening from his reflection and waddling stolidly
back into the house.
_My Brother Paul_
I like best to think of him as he was at the height of his all-too-brief
reputation and success, when, as the author and composer of various
American popular successes ("On the Banks of the Wabash," "Just Tell
Them That You Saw Me," and various others), as a third owner of one of
the most successful popular music publishing houses in the city and as
an actor and playwright of some small repute, he was wont to spin like a
moth in the white light of Broadway. By reason of a little luck and some
talent he had come so far, done so much for himself. In his day he had
been by turn a novitiate in a Western seminary which trained aspirants
for the Catholic priesthood; a singer and entertainer with a
perambulating cure-all oil troupe or wagon ("Hamlin's Wizard Oil")
traveling throughout Ohio, Indiana and Illinois; both end- and middle-man
with one, two or three different minstrel companies of repute; the
editor or originator and author of a "funny column" in a Western small
city paper; the author of the songs mentioned and a hundred others; a
black-face monologue artist; a white-face ditto, at Tony Pastor's,
Miner's and Niblo's of the old days; a comic lead; co-star and star in
such melodramas and farces as "The Danger Signal," "The Two Johns," "A
Tin Soldier," "The Midnight Bell," "A Green Goods Man" (a farce which he
himself wrote, by the way), and others. The man had a genius for the
kind of gayety, poetry and romance which may, and no doubt must be,
looked upon as exceedingly middle-class but which nonetheless had as
much charm as anything in this world can well have. He had at this time
absolutely no cares or financial worries of any kind, and this plus his
health, self-amusing disposition and talent for entertaining, made him a
most fascinating figure to contemplate.
My first recollection of him is of myself as a boy often and he a man of
twenty-five (my oldest brother). He had come back to the town in which
we were then living solely to find his mother and help her. Six or seven
years before he had left without any explanation as to where he was
going, tired of or irritated by the routine of a home which for any
genuine opportunity it offered him might as well never have existed. It
was run dominantly by my father in the interest of religious and moral
theories, with which this boy had little sympathy. He was probably not
understood by any one save my mother, who understood or at least
sympathized with us all. Placed in a school which was to turn him out a
priest, he had decamped, and now seven years later was here in this
small town, with fur coat and silk hat, a smart cane--a gentleman of the
theatrical profession. He had joined a minstrel show somewhere and had
become an "end-man." He had suspected that we were not as fortunate in
this world's goods as might be and so had returned. His really great
heart had called him.
But the thing which haunts me, and which was typical of him then as
throughout life, was the spirit which he then possessed and conveyed. It
was one of an agile geniality, unmarred by thought of a serious
character but warm and genuinely tender and with a taste for simple
beauty which was most impressive. He was already the author of a cheap
songbook, "_The Paul Dresser Songster_" ("All the Songs Sung in the
Show"), and some copies of this he had with him, one of which he gave
me. But we having no musical instrument of any kind, he taught me some
of the melodies "by ear." The home in which by force of poverty we were
compelled to live was most unprepossessing and inconvenient, and the
result of his coming could but be our request for, or at least the
obvious need of, assistance. Still he was as much an enthusiastic part
of it as though he belonged to it. He was happy in it, and the cause of
his happiness was my mother, of whom he was intensely fond. I recall how
he hung about her in the kitchen or wherever she happened to be, how
enthusiastically he related all his plans for the future, his amusing
difficulties in the past. He was very grand and youthfully
self-important, or so we all thought, and still he patted her on the
shoulder or put his arm about her and kissed her. Until she died years
later she was truly his uppermost thought, crying with her at times over
her troubles and his. He contributed regularly to her support and sent
home all his cast-off clothing to be made over for the younger ones.
(Bless her tired hands!)
As I look back now on my life, I realize quite clearly that of all the
members of my family, subsequent to my mother's death, the only one who
truly understood me, or, better yet, sympathized with my intellectual
and artistic point of view, was, strange as it may seem, this same Paul,
my dearest brother. Not that he was in any way fitted intellectually or
otherwise to enjoy high forms of art and learning and so guide me, or
that he understood, even in later years (long after I had written
"Sister Carrie," for instance), what it was that I was attempting to do;
he never did. His world was that of the popular song, the middle-class
actor or comedian, the middle-class comedy, and such humorous aesthetes
of the writing world as Bill Nye, Petroleum V. Nasby, the authors of the
Spoopendyke Papers, and "Samantha at Saratoga." As far as I could make
out--and I say this in no lofty, condescending spirit, by any means--he
was entirely full of simple, middle-class romance, middle-class humor,
middle-class tenderness and middle-class grossness, all of which I am
very free to say early disarmed and won me completely and kept me so
much his debtor that I should hesitate to try to acknowledge or explain
all that he did for or meant to me.
Imagine, if you can, a man weighing all of three hundred pounds, not
more than five feet ten-and-one-half inches in height and yet of so
lithesome a build that he gave not the least sense of either undue
weight or lethargy. His temperament, always ebullient and radiant,
presented him as a clever, eager, cheerful, emotional and always highly
illusioned person with so collie-like a warmth that one found him
compelling interest and even admiration. Easily cast down at times by
the most trivial matters, at others, and for the most part, he was so
spirited and bubbly and emotional and sentimental that your fiercest or
most gloomy intellectual rages or moods could scarcely withstand his
smile. This tenderness or sympathy of his, a very human appreciation of
the weaknesses and errors as well as the toils and tribulations of most
of us, was by far his outstanding and most engaging quality, and gave
him a very definite force and charm. Admitting, as I freely do, that he
was very sensuous (gross, some people might have called him), that he
had an intense, possibly an undue fondness for women, a frivolous,
childish, horse-playish sense of humor at times, still he had other
qualities which were absolutely adorable. Life seemed positively to
spring up fountain-like in him. One felt in him a capacity to do (in
his possibly limited field); an ability to achieve, whether he was doing
so at the moment or not, and a supreme willingness to share and radiate
his success--qualities exceedingly rare, I believe. Some people are so
successful, and yet you know their success is purely selfish--exclusive,
not inclusive; they never permit you to share in their lives. Not so my
good brother. He was generous to the point of self-destruction, and that
is literally true. He was the mark if not the prey of all those who
desired much or little for nothing, those who previously might not have
rendered him a service of any kind. He was all life and color, and
thousands (I use the word with care) noted and commented on it.
When I first came to New York he was easily the foremost popular
song-writer of the day and was the cause of my coming, so soon at least,
having established himself in the publishing field and being so
comfortably settled as to offer me a kind of anchorage in so troubled a
commercial sea. I was very much afraid of New York, but with him here it
seemed not so bad. The firm of which he was a part had a floor or two in
an old residence turned office building, as so many are in New York, in
Twentieth Street very close to Broadway, and here, during the summer
months (1894-7) when the various theatrical road-companies, one of which
he was always a part, had returned for the closed season, he was to be
found aiding his concern in the reception and care of possible
applicants for songs and attracting by his personality such virtuosi of
the vaudeville and comedy stage as were likely to make the instrumental
publications of his firm a success.
I may as well say here that he had no more business skill than a fly. At
the same time, he was in no wise sycophantic where either wealth, power
or fame was concerned. He considered himself a personage of sorts, and
was. The minister, the moralist, the religionist, the narrow, dogmatic
and self-centered in any field were likely to be the butt of his humor,
and he could imitate so many phases of character so cleverly that he was
the life of any idle pleasure-seeking party anywhere. To this day I
recall his characterization of an old Irish washerwoman arguing; a
stout, truculent German laying down the law; lean, gloomy, out-at-elbows
actors of the Hamlet or classic school complaining of their fate; the
stingy skinflint haggling over a dollar, and always with a skill for
titillating the risibilities which is vivid to me even to this day.
Other butts of his humor were the actor, the Irish day-laborer, the
negro and the Hebrew. And how he could imitate them! It is useless to
try to indicate such things in writing, the facial expression, the
intonation, the gestures; these are not things of words. Perhaps I can
best indicate the direction of his mind, if not his manner, by the
following:
One night as we were on our way to a theater there stood on a nearby
corner in the cold a blind man singing and at the same time holding out
a little tin cup into which the coins of the charitably inclined were
supposed to be dropped. At once my brother noticed him, for he had an
eye for this sort of thing, the pathos of poverty as opposed to so gay a
scene, the street with its hurrying theater crowds. At the same time, so
inherently mischievous was his nature that although his sympathy for the
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